re: Will Smith Murder Trial-Guilty of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter

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“No one there had an intent of agreeing with the second-degree murder (charge). No one. I know that may come as a surprise,” she said. “Really, what we were struggling with was not guilty — which didn’t bode well either, because (Hayes) had some responsibility for his actions.”

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But the juror said Smith’s friends seemed to gloss over another forensic finding in their testimony: Smith's high state of inebriation. The Coroner’s Office said his blood alcohol content was .235, nearly three times the legal limit for driving.

“I’m sorry, you don’t go just a hair shy of three times over the legal limit and your friends don’t know,” she said. “Everybody kind of loses credibility when they’re not being truthful.”

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The juror said she respected the testimony of Smith’s wife, but that “I felt like maybe a lot of her memory was more of the man that she loved, rather than the man that was there that night.”

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The juror said she was surprised that Hayes decided to testify in his own defense, but she thought it helped his case.

“It gave him some humanity that we were unable to see until that point,” she said.

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The juror nevertheless found one of Hayes’ most crucial claims to be incredible. The 29-year-old tow-truck driver said that he believed Smith had picked up a gun and that he heard a "pop" sound when he opened fire in response.

“I know what he was trying to say about Will’s shooting, or that he thought he saw a gun,” she said. “He was on trial for his life, so you can understand how maybe in this amount of time that he has convinced himself of that, possibly. But none of us believed that.”

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The juror said the group quickly dispensed with one charge. Prosecutors had accused Hayes of aggravated criminal damage to property for ramming his Hummer H2 into Smith’s Mercedes SUV on the night of April 9. But the juror said there simply was not enough evidence to show that the act was intentional.

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“Two were pretty adamant about acquittal. Five were on the fence, trying to work through the emotion of that and what it meant, and then the other five were (that) he was not going to walk away without consequences. That’s really how it stacked up,” she said.

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